Ray was extremely proud of this photograph, which shows him and his grandmother reading in the main downstairs room at 29 All Saints Road, Birmingham. He lost his father when he was four, and after a few years, he, his elder brother Don (that's a portrait of him in his Air Force uniform on the wall), and my grandmother ended up with her parents in Kings Heath, B'ham. I think his grandfather would fairly recently have died, at the point that he took this photo - probably around 1938.
This is a self-portrait. Ray fixed up the camera (I think it would have been a Vest Pocket Kodak Model B - at least, that's the only one I've unearthed of the right vintage) so that he could operate a self-designed lens cap from afar. So he put it all in place, and then pulled a string to make the exposure (did he also manage to darken everything again, at that point? - this is so frustrating - I know he described the process to me in the last couple of years, and I can't quite remember ...), whilst he and Grandma Barber stayed very, very still. I'm not sure what the illumination would have been - maybe it was daylight? Certainly it's not flash. And they didn't yet have electric light - Ray recollected the excitement in the Barber/Flint household when they were connected to mains power, and then the horror, after the electric light was at last turned on, of realising how dusty and dirty everything was.
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